“The Epic of Gilgameshis about what it means to be human. In the original Sumerian version, laid down before Babylonian times, the king finds Utanapishti and receives not just the story of the flood but also long-lost information on practices and rituals that had fallen out of use after the deluge. Gilgamesh returns to Uruk to restore the old ways and be more civilized, which means, amongst other things, ruling wisely and caring for a human community. A hero who at the beginning of the Epicis clearly closer to the gods than to ordinary mortals, a bumbling superpower labeled a “wild bull on the rampage,” grows and learns that he is not all-powerful or all-knowing, that he will not live forever. He is a man, after all, even if he is divine. Beginning and ending with stanzas that emphasize the magnificence of the walls of Uruk, the whole narrative exudes the message that what man leaves behind is his only hope for immortality.”

Gilgamesh is also a crucial black box on American drones. One of those magic devices that has convinced us that what we are doing in the war on terrorism is logical and precise. We are all-seeing; they are all-seeing. No wonder we are in an era of perpetual warfare.

Found a little more about Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the Computer Network Exploitation/Computer Network Attack (CNE/CNA) operation of NSA, long known, but mentioned in the Washington Post article last week revealing the National Intelligence Budget. The Post describes TAO as “surreptitiously installing spyware and tracking devices on targeted computers and mobile-phone networks.” I think that description is too broad.

Tailored Access Operations, or sometimes called Defense Tailored Access Operations, is part of the S3 Data Aquisition, or the Signal Intelligence Directorate. It is made up of six subordinate elements (branches):

S321: Remote Operations Center (ROC)

S323: Data Network Technologies (DNT)

S324: Telecommunication Network Technologies (TNT)

S325: Mission Infrastructure Technologies (MIT)

S327: Requirements & Targeting (R&T)

S328: Access Technologies Operations (ATO)

The Remote Operations Center is the primary CNE operation of the U.S. government to gain access and intelligence from computer networks in direct support to cyber security & network warfare missions. It is made up of the following divisions:

NOC: Network Ops Center

ORD: Operational Readiness Division (Training)

IOD: Interactive Ops Division

POD: Production Ops Division

AOD: Access Operations Division

The Network Warfare Team (NWT) provides liaison between the military and TAO.

“Homeland security begins with hometown security, and fusion centers play a vital role in keeping communities safe all across America,” homeland security commandant Janet Napolitano said at the government-sponsored National Fusion Center Training Event held in Phoenix, Arizona last week.

Amid controversy over the federal government’s spending on lavish conferences (hence the rapid deployment of the name training event), Napolitano’s obsession with making all of America snitches under her See Something, Say Something campaign, continued controversy over ICE’s secure communities program, and even speculation that the former Arizona governor will step down if Obama wins a second term, no one actually paid attention to the Secretary’s central message.

The “war” on terror, the one over there that was supposed to have been a magnet for terrorists so that American itself would be safe, shows no sign of either ultimate success or conclusion, and it is turning these United States into an even greater battlefield.

Napolitano even says that the threat of home-grown terrorism is “increasing,” and she anchors federal government strategy to turn state-level fusion centers as increasingly essential links between local law enforcement and the Washington intelligence machine.

I know that Napolitano’s piece of this forever war is the homeland, but who would have thought that eleven years after 9/11, some federal government official could stand up before 600 state and local government intelligence officers cheering them on, and it’s a non-story?

To be fair to the locals, fusion centers represent not just threat early warning; they are also federal support at a time when police budgets are declining, they are a seat at the information table, and they are a new and exotic career pursuit, one that promises the big times. Under the rubric of “all hazards” most fusion centers admittedly focus more on everyday crime.” But the funding, and the push, is all about terrorism, and the justification, is that there are an abundance of terrorists in our midst.

Terrorists are “not just those coming from abroad we’re concerned about, it’s those that are U.S. citizens – that are home grown, that are right here,” Napolitano declares.

“It can be people who are right here and who we don’t have much knowledge about,” Napolitano said.

Not knowing much about them of course means information collection, Internet stalking, surveillance, even reconnaissance drones at the local level.

Ron Brooks, chairman of the Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council and a San Francisco-area fusion center official told the Arizona Republic: “We’re worried about the al-Qaida attack, the self-radicalized homegrown extremism attack, the far-right violence, but we’re also worried about everyday crime that impacts our community.”

Brooks says a lot of work needs to be done to educate people about what to look for in their search for the home-grown. “There are times when we get suspicious activity reported to us by law enforcement or the public, and it really is about how someone is dressing or talking or worshiping, and we push that back and say, ‘That’s not appropriate’…” he says.

But fear not, civil liberties and privacy is all being taken care of: as Napolitano says, there’s an organization at homeland security responsible for it.

And See Something, Say Something is working, according to Napolitano, because the campaign has recently expanded to include partnerships with sports teams, sports leagues, transportation agencies and colleges and universities. Hooray!

Putting aside my view that there shouldn’t even be something called homeland security – it’s just law enforcement at home, not national security – is Napolitano right that homeland security begins with hometown security? Are the states even intended to be so intimately involved in national security in the first place? Isn’t that the fundamental role of the federal government? The United States has transformed, and we are less secure, and what’s the news? How much money some agency spends on conferences or the fact that sports leagues are now part of the homeland security reserves…

Yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence and Attorney General released what they call “updated guidelines designed to allow NCTC to obtain and more effectively analyze certain data in the government’s possession to better address terrorism-related threats.”

The updated Guidelines, the government says, “do not provide any new authorities for the U.S. Government to collect information.”

I received a copy of the new guidelines from the DNI press office at 7:53 PM last night, but I note that the 32 page document is not readily available (as of 9 AM the day after the release) on either the DNI or Attorney General’s websites.

I don’t think there’s a conspiracy here, but I do think if you read the actual document and aren’t familiar with existing guidelines and the ifs, ands, and buts of government regulations, you could easily come away concerned.

And thus constitutes the divide, the divide between Washington and the rest of the nation, between the national security imperative and the colloquial understanding of liberty as practiced by the rest of the country. The usual suspects of the civil liberties industry (and I don’t mean to disparage them) and the anti-government set (from gun-toters to olive-branchers) will decry; talking heads promoting public slumber will counsel calm; the media will muddle.

Meanwhile the government’s lawyers will satisfy themselves and reassure – as they did in their tortured legal justification sanctioning the summary assassination of an American citizen – that it’s all in accordance with applicable laws. If you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the problem?, the agents of idiocy will bellow.

The NCTC, the actual document says, “shall not access, acquire, retain, use, or disseminate United States person information solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment or monitoring the lawful exercise of other rights secured by the Constitution or other laws of the United States.”

Any information received must be reviewed to ensure that it is terrorist-related, the guideline says, that is, “based on the knowledge and experience of counterterrorism analysts as well as the facts and practical considerations of everyday life.”

It’s all pretty straightforward, except that these rules only apply to the National Counter-terrorism Center. And they leave open possibilities – indeed the likelihood – that the national security establishment will over-reach, that an overzealous someone will bend and stretch the rules and their intent, heck, that this has already been done, is already being done, which is why new Guidelines were required.

The NCTC, the Guidelines say, receives its information from federal, state, local governments and “other sources,” “other entities,” “data providers,” none of whom are named. Any abuses, in other words, will take place elsewhere.

As long as Washington is lost in its terror war, as long as the intelligence community remains beyond accountability, as long as lawyers justify anything as legal, what is already happening in America will continue to happen. It isn’t a government conspiracy; it’s an American erosion occurring because we haven’t figure out yet either how to deal with the abundance of information the government feels justified to collect and analyze and we haven’t figured out how to deal with the basic criminal threat that terrorism represents.

Qualified applicants for this position should include a Bachelors degree in Computer Science/Engineering or a related field (or equivalent experience) and an active security clearance. Successful candidates will possess a strong understanding in one or more of the following areas: Operating system fundamentals, including interrupts, threading, virtual memory, device drivers; knowledge and understanding of operating system/kernel internals including stack/heap design and memory layout and management, device drivers, file system/application formats, reverse engineering, modification of existing binaries, and low level software development.

About This Blog

Part vanity, part practical, I decided to start my own blog in January 2012 to provide a home for my musings and writings. I also wanted a place to archive old articles and studies. I plan to write about the defense budget, government secrecy, the "war" on terrorism, homeland security, and the root of all evil: Washington. I'm not looking to be a scooper or a reporter. The thoughts are mine and mine alone. Write me if you want to make me or my readers smarter. Check out asides and comments @warkin on Twitter.